The Inner Life of Empires

by Emma Rothschild (Princeton; $35)

The eleven Johnstone siblings of Westerhall, in Scotland, were “a large and disorderly family,” whose lives, playing out on three continents between 1723 and 1813, illuminate what Rothschild calls an “empire of intimate exchanges.” The subject is well chosen and provocatively explored. One brother was a governor in Pensacola; another was an East India Company official in Bengal; a Jacobite sister fled to France. The family owned a Grenada estate with hundreds of slaves, and Rothschild writes that the most historically significant players were not the four brothers who served in Parliament but two indentured people: a man who sued one of the Johnstones, saying, “The petitioner does not admit that he is a slave” (resulting in a landmark ruling); and a woman whose trial for infanticide in Fife ended with her being transported to Virginia, on the eve of revolution. ♦

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.